Consequences of a Criminal Record for Employment Opportunity in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 2002 (ICPSR 3599)

This study examined employers' policies and practices for
hiring entry-level workers in the Milwaukee metropolitan area. The
study consisted of telephone interviews conducted in the spring of
2002 with 177 employers who had advertised entry-level openings in the
prior six months. The survey included questions about the company,
such as size, industry, employee turnover, and racial composition,
questions about hiring procedures, questions about the last worker
hired for a position not... (more info)

This study examined employers' policies and practices for
hiring entry-level workers in the Milwaukee metropolitan area. The
study consisted of telephone interviews conducted in the spring of
2002 with 177 employers who had advertised entry-level openings in the
prior six months. The survey included questions about the company,
such as size, industry, employee turnover, and racial composition,
questions about hiring procedures, questions about the last worker
hired for a position not requiring a college degree, and questions
about the employer's attitude toward various kinds of marginalized
workers. An emphasis in the survey was placed on assessing employers'
attitudes about and experience with applicants with criminal
histories.

Access Notes

These data are freely available.

Dataset(s)

Study Description

Citation

Pager, Devah. CONSEQUENCES OF A CRIMINAL RECORD FOR EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY IN MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN, 2002. ICPSR version. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin [producer], 2002. Conducted by the Michigan State Survey Center. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2003. http://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR03599.v1

Universe:
Employers in the Milwaukee area who advertised for
entry-level jobs between June and December 2001.

Data Types:
survey data

Data Collection Notes:

The user guide, codebook, and data collection
instrument are provided by ICPSR as Portable Document Format (PDF)
files. The PDF file format was developed by Adobe Systems,
Incorporated and can be accessed using PDF reader software, such as
the Adobe Acrobat Reader. Information on how to obtain a copy of the
Acrobat Reader is provided on the ICPSR Web site.

Methodology

Study Purpose:
This study investigated how and why employers
make the hiring decisions they do. Questions asked included: (1) How
do employers' reactions to applicants with criminal records compare
to their reactions to other groups of marginalized workers? (2) How
does the type of crime or the context of the sanction affect
employers' evaluations of applicants with criminal records? (3) What
kinds of formal screens do employers use to evaluate applicants for
entry-level jobs? and (4) How do the characteristics of the job, the
applicant pool, the customer base, and the company (location, size,
industry, etc.) affect employers' willingness to consider applicants
with criminal records?

Study Design:
Data consist of 177 completed telephone interviews
with employers. The survey was administered by the Michigan State
Survey Center. Calls were made to each establishment, asking to speak
with the person in charge of hiring. The baseline survey instrument
was developed by Harry Holzer et al. (1996, 2002). It includes
questions about the company, such as size, industry, employee
turnover, and racial composition, questions about hiring procedures,
questions about the last worker hired for a position not requiring a
college degree, and questions about the employer's attitude toward
various kinds of marginalized workers. In addition, several vignette
items were added to assess employers' reactions to applicants
convicted of different types of crimes or who had received different
types of sanctions. Roughly half of employers were read a vignette in
which the subject was presented as White, with the other half
receiving a vignette in which the subject was presented as Black.

Sample:
Job openings for entry-level positions (defined as job
requiring no previous experience and no education past high school)
were identified from the classified section of the MILWAUKEE JOURNAL
SENTINEL's Sunday edition between June and December 2001. During this
same time period, a supplemental sample was drawn from JOBNET, a
state-sponsored Web site for employment listings. All job openings
within a 25-mile radius of downtown Milwaukee were included.

Data Source:

Data were obtained through telephone interviews.

Description of Variables:
Variables include the business's location, its main
product, whether it was minority-owned, its distance from public
transportation, how long it would take to get from the downtown
business area to the business using public transportation, total
employees, number of temporary employees, number of unskilled
employees, number of positions that did not require a college degree,
race of employees in non-college degree positions, percentage of
employees covered by a collective bargaining agreement, number of
workers hired in past year, number of workers who left the business in
the last year, and number of current job vacancies. Other variables
focus on details of the application and hiring process for the last
employee hired into a position that did not require a college degree,
sex, age, race, and education of that employee, kinds of tasks
regularly performed by that employee, kind of education and work
experience needed for that position, the compensation for that
position, number of hours per week usually worked in that position,
whether health insurance was provided for that position, and
possibility of promotion for someone in that position. Additional
items include whether the business would hire an applicant on welfare,
an applicant with a GED, an applicant with a criminal record, an
applicant with only part-time work experience, or an applicant who had
been unemployed for over a year, whether the company required
applicants to take a drug test, what percentage of drug tests had been
positive in the last year, whether the company asked applicants about
their criminal background, percentage of applicants that reported a
prior conviction in the last year, whether the company performed
background checks, percentage of background checks in the last year
that found a criminal record, how background checks were performed,
number of employees company hired with a criminal record in the last
year, number of those still employed, how positive the company's
experience with those employees was, the percentage of applicants who
were Black, White, and Hispanic, the percentage of customers who were
Black, White, and Hispanic, and the respondent's title, race, age,
education, and gender. Also included are answers to questions that
described hypothetical applicants.

Response Rates:
The final survey sample of 177 respondents
represented a 51-percent response rate. Four firms were dropped from
the survey sample and were excluded from the denominator for the
calculation of the response rate.

Presence of Common Scales:
Several Likert-type scales were used.

Extent of Processing: ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of
disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major
statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to
these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:

Standardized missing values.

Version(s)

Original ICPSR Release:2003-06-19

Version History:

2005-11-04 On 2005-03-14 new files were added to one
or more datasets. These files included additional setup files as well
as one or more of the following: SAS program, SAS transport, SPSS portable,
and Stata system files. The metadata record was revised 2005-11-04 to
reflect these additions.